After more than 60 years, Harriet Tubman has finally escaped
the hagiographic bondage of juvenile biography into the complex
freedom of not just one, but three adult accounts of her life.
This sudden wealth certainly dramatizes a renewed interest
in Tubman’s contributions to our national history, but it
also draws attention to the complications surrounding a figure
who left no written record of her own. Illiterate all her
life, Tubman offered only oral presentations of her story,
so posterity must rely on the interpretations and impressions
of others, a fact that increases tenfold the problems of “truth”
inherent in any biography. In addition, “hard facts” are very
thinly scattered in Harriet’s tale—her name and year of birth
for starters—and many biases and agendas, including Tubman’s
own, have shaped and reshaped the telling of her tale.

From school, you probably remember that Harriet Tubman was
an American slave who escaped captivity prior to the Civil
War, but returned south many times, endangering her life,
to say nothing of her freedom, in order to bring other slaves
north. Perhaps you also recall that Tubman just missed accompanying
John Brown on the disastrous Harper’s Ferry raid and that
she served during the Civil War as a nurse, cook, laundress,
scout, and spy. She even directed one famous raid into Georgia
that freed more than 700 slaves and destroyed a goodly amount
of Confederate property. But almost no one knows that after
the war she worked assiduously in support of women’s suffrage
and a wide variety of black causes. Always horribly poor,
she also maintained an extensive household of relatives, needy
children and old people by her own hard physical labor. Money
never stayed long in Tubman’s pocket, and she didn’t spend
it on herself.

The first accounts about Tubman date from shortly after she
crossed the Mason-Dixon line, when she was debriefed, as we
would say today, by various “stationmasters” on the Underground
Railroad. After she had made several trips back south, abolitionists
asked her to speak to small groups about her experiences of
slavery and the dangerous trips she was making. A natural
actor, Tubman sang, danced, gestured, whispered, and laughed
with joy at the ways she and other slaves eluded capture.
The abolitionists quickly called her “Moses” because she was
leading her people to the Promised Land. Equally quickly they
began to inflate her exploits, since greater feats of heroism
attracted more supporters to abolition.

After the Civil War, Tubman became a much more vexing subject.
Class and cultural differences, as well as racism, distorted
the vision even of her supporters. In Tubman’s first biography—an
“as told to” affair that Tubman arranged in 1868 in order
to raise money—the author, Sarah Bradford, tells Tubman’s
tales in her version of Tubman’s Southern dialect, a quaint
and condescending move that distances Tubman’s life from accounts
like that of Frederick Douglass, whose language and reflections
resembled those of educated middle-class whites. Tubman’s
postwar white supporters tended to prefer her as the simple
hero of the Underground Railroad rather than as the struggling
black farmer who didn’t use money the way they wanted her
to. After Tubman’s death in 1913, almost nothing was written
about her until the ’30s when a labor activist named Earl
Conrad undertook a major biography. He had grown up in Auburn,
N.Y., where Tubman finally settled, and was looking for just
“the right black history subject.” He interviewed many family
members, and his work was meticulous, but it took him until
1943 to find a publisher. Interest in Tubman continued to
languish among whites until the civil rights movement, when
her slave-stealing adventures reemerged in the form of edifying
children’s narratives.

Of the three new biographies, that by Catherine Clinton probably
will win the widest readership. This is too bad because it’s
not much more than a higher-calorie juvenile biography. Clinton,
an academic with several popular histories to her credit,
has the easiest writing style, although this book seems curiously
pro forma, and it’s also the shortest. Her readers don’t have
to know much history because Clinton supplies background on
everything from conditions under slavery to the Underground
Railroad and John Brown. But Clinton sticks to the old heroic
narrative. One footnote mentions that scholars question the
number of trips Tubman actually made south, but in the text
itself, Clinton speaks of “countless missions.” One painful
tooth that Tubman was known to have knocked out of her mouth
becomes “her top row of teeth.” Tubman’s activities after
the war receive very short shrift.

Kate Larson and Jean Humez have done far more research and
questioned everything. Both are academics who traded information
with each other on new sources and theories, so it’s a shame
that their accounts must compete with each other. Larson,
like Clinton, studies Tubman’s life chronologically and provides
historical background, but Larson provides a much richer and
more nuanced analysis, particularly with regard to conditions
in Maryland where Tubman grew up. Larson’s painstaking research
into Tubman’s family is a matter of some importance because
Tubman seems to have gone back south because she wanted to
rescue her family. Often a group she brought north would include
nonrelatives, and if she could not bring those she intended
to rescue, she would take others who were ready to go. She
also seems to have given instructions to many whom she didn’t
personally guide to freedom. But it appears that her principal
motivation was to free what remained of her blood family.
This in no way belittles her courage, generosity, or commitment
to abolition, but rather it puts her actions into a real-life
context. Larson also discusses the many jobs Tubman worked
to collect the funds necessary for her dangerous trips south
as well as to help fund the new lives of those she brought
to Canada (and later upstate New York). Larson treats Tubman’s
fascinating Civil War career in similar detail, which makes
all the more shameful the federal government’s failure to
pay her properly.

Alas, Larson is not a stylist, although she improves as her
book progresses. In terms of sheer information and thoughtful
evaluation, however, her book is greatly superior to Clinton’s.
In addition, Larson’s book has maps, an invaluable genealogical
chart of Tubman’s family, and a concise chronology of Tubman’s
life.

The study by Humez is by far the most interesting of the three
biographies. I devoutly pray that teachers who plan to discuss
Tubman in their classes will read this book. Not only does
Humez untangle the many versions of Tubman’s story, but she
also evaluates them with dazzling clarity. She discusses oral
slave testimony with great insight and reminds us of simple
but often overlooked truths, such as the fact that former
slaves were more candid when they talked to black researchers.
Humez notes how Tubman’s admirers all expressed their complete
faith in her honesty and candor, as they simultaneously celebrated
her proven ability to hoodwink and fool people. Many commented
on her ability to control her face and appearance, without
reflecting that she might have reason to do so with them as
well. This becomes particularly pertinent later in Tubman’s
life when her aims and those of her white friends were not
necessarily as congruent as they had been prior to and during
the Civil War.

Harriet Tubman, insofar as we can approach the actual person,
was a courageous woman of great strength, endurance, and generosity,
not a plastic action figure. Larson and Humez do their level
best to let us see Tubman as she really was.